Day 563 - A Golden Day

We woke up this morning and prepared ourselves to disembark. When Liv went to get her shoes she found ... well, nothing! Her shoes had been stolen during the night! WHO STEALS PEOPLE'S SHOES?!!!! This turned our moods to the dark side - we lived and travelled in China for 14 months and never had anything stolen, but after a week in India we've already lost a pair of shoes!!! We often get sales people or touts asking us "why don't you trust me", and this is the reason why!

Anyway, it was lucky we had sandals in the pack (which Liv wore with style, complete with socks), as we had to get our walk on to find a hotel in our new destination: Amritsar. After an hour or so of searching we found a place to dump our packs and didn't return until dark.

In that time we were blown away by the magnificence of the Golden Temple - a Sikh Temple that is literally covered in gold. The temple appears as if it was floating in the middle of a crystal like pond that reflects and intensifies the golden beauty. It was a calming experience to walk bare-footed among the masses who have come to show their devotion in this truly spiritual place. After this we spent hours looking at plastic-fantastic shoes - this is the main reason we're so annoyed at the stolen property: not only are the shoes here crap, we also hate shoe shopping with a vengeance!!!

We found lunch and set off on a wild goose chase for the bus station, with people sending us in opposing directions! Despite being frustrating we eventually found it and got the info we needed, and were soon bound for the India-Pakistan border.

(Here is a snippet of one of the many travel warnings we get from the NZ government:

The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has reviewed its travel advisory for India. There is 'extreme risk' to your security ... ... along the India-Pakistan international border and we advise against all travel to these areas. Terrorist activity, political violence and violent crime pose an extreme risk to security.

We didn't get this warning until a few days after we went to the border, but with all the machine guns around we felt ironically safe!)

When we arrived at the border we made our way through the intense security and then made a rush with all the hundreds of other people running for the border. Before you start thinking we were making a side trip into Pakistan, the real reason for our border visit was to watch the border closing ceremony.

The ceremony is an extremely loud and showy event with crowds on both sides of the border cheering, waving flags, and chanting as guards perform the in-your-face marching antics! We were surprised that some guards didn't dislocate joints with the force of their kicks! It was quite a hilarious and exciting half hour ...

To get back to Amritsar about an hour away, we expected to retrace our ride to the bus stand and then catch a local bus back, but our tuk-tuk just kept going and we ended up going all the way sitting out the back of a tuk-tuk. Back in town we had a slightly more upmarket meal than we're used to, but we felt we deserved it after a bad start to the day and accomplishing so much in one day!

Adlibing it shoeless.